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My household grew by one yesterday!  Meet Star:

She’s a baby African Pygmy Hedgehog. She was born on Feb 20th, 2020, and is still so so tiny! I got her from a local breeder, Tucson Hedgehogs, who take extraordinary care of their babies, training them and adapting them to being held, and make sure they are going to a good home by inspecting habitats before approving adoptions. The whole operation was professional and made me feel confident adopting a hedgehog from them.

Here’s the habitat I made for her out of a $10 kiddie pool:

Hedgehogs run like crazy at night, so the big pool was a good option to give her lots of room to run. The running wheel was popular last night. Hedgehogs are prey animals, so the thing they most want to do is burrow and hide, which she has plenty of opportunities for here. This morning I found her under the blue snuggle sack (not inside?). That’s why they love toilet paper rolls too, they stick their little heads inside and push them around and run around with them. I’ll try to get y’all a video or something when she does it, it’s pretty great. There is also a thermometer and heat lamp. Hedgehogs try to hibernate if it gets too cold, and that can be bad for their health, so hedgie owners have to be sure their environment is kept warm enough.

Here’s some more hedgehog facts. They are insectivores, and they’re actually immune to scorpion venom! They’re nocturnal, but they can be adapted to operate somewhat during the daytime, and can also be trained to use cat litter! But otherwise they’re not very smart, so that’s about all the training we can expect really. They’re also nearly blind, but their hearing and smell are top notch. They do this strange behavior that animal behaviorists aren’t quite sure why, called self-anointing. When a hedgie smells or tastes something new and exciting, they froth up and lick their spit all over their quills. It’s funny and kinda gross.

The popular pets in America are the African pygmy variety, which are related to but very different from their European cousins. African pygmy hedgies actually don’t exist in the wild, they’re only kept as pets!

Here’s some more Star glamour shots.

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Lastly, if you’ve been to my house or known me for a few minutes, you might know I have a bit of a thing for hedgehogs. So I wanted to finish off with a snapshot of the other hedgehogs in my house…

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That’s not close to all of them. People give me hedgehog things all the time, and I do nothing to discourage this behavior. In my former life as a middle school teacher, my students learned of my hedgehog habit and the gifts started rolling in. It was magical. (Pro tip: if you ever need to entertain ~30 twelve year olds for about 5 minutes while you wait for the bell to ring, I can wholeheartedly recommend hedgehog videos on YouTube. Also OK Go videos.)

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In honor of how cute Star is, song of the day is Cute Explosion by MrWeebl:

In the past week the heat has been slowly ramping up and it will continue to go up the next couple weeks. So staying home and inside is actually not that bad. One thing that I do have noticed is that we are going through our supply of food slightly faster than normal. It seems like I am quite easily distracted by snacks. Luckily, in the past week we had an opportunity to order some items from a Dutch food import shop. So today I am going to share some typical Dutch food and snacks. Of course I will go through the not so famous examples, because everyone knows about Dutch pancakes, raw herring and liquorice.

The most important part of a Dutch diet is bread. According to statista we are eating 60kg of bread on average per year, that is more than double the US average https://www.world-grain.com/articles/8702-three-bread-trends-shaping-american-diets. This also leads to aisles full of products that you can put on your bread in the Netherlands. One of our favorite products is hagelslag (sprinklers) and we do not kid around with them. There is a large variety of hagelslag, from sweet to sweeter to sweetest. Mainstream sprinklers are chocolate sprinklers and you can find them anywhere. Whenever you find that chocolate is not really your flavor you can just switch to fruity flavors (who am I kidding, there is never enough chocolate).

Another option when you do not really know what chocolate to pick exactly is the mix, where we have just mixed different flavors of chocolate.

We have three flavors of chocolate sprinklers and two fruit flavors, and now you may think that is it. But, luckily we are not even halfway through all sort of sprinklers. If the sprinklers are to small for you, there is always the xxl hagelslag. And of course this one also comes in many flavors.

If you do not like these 3D shapes of hagelslag you can always go for vlokken (flakes). Vlokken are, well, flakes of chocolate.

All these types of sprinkles come from the invention of the anise sprinklers that were created in the early 20th century. Dutch tradition dictates that you secretly place a tray of biscuits with ‘muisjes’ (anice sprinklers) in the common area of your workplace if you are expecting a baby. Then the other people will try to guess who placed it there. Another quirk of the muisjes is that you usually pick the color of the gender of you baby, pink for a girl and blue for a boy.

And then finally we end up with the luxurious line of sprinklers which have been created in last couple years. If you are feeling that the normal chocolate is too sweet and therefore for children, we have the perfect type for you. You can always enjoy a more adult flavor of extra pure chocolate. This means that you get your hagelslag with a higher concentration of cacao or a little bit of coffee flavor.

So by now I hope you are convinced that hagelslag are a very good idea and that you can create an endless variety. That is it for today and I will be picking up my new box of hagelslag that just came in!

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For the song of the day I picked shipwrecked by Alestorm as we are all shipwrecked at home.

It has long been my intention to use a XWCL blog post to spread the delights of Simon & Garfunkel with the watching world. But, well, I’m still not going to quite get around to it with this post (but halfway there!).

The song of the day is “Waters of March” sung by Art Garfunkel. Feel free to close your eyes as the melody sweeps over you.

Hello everyone, my name is Justin. I’m a soon-to-be Ph.D-holder-guy in the midst of writing my dissertation on the topic of the coronagraphic architecture known as the PIAACMC (Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraph). Basically this coronagraph uses everything but the kitchen sink to suppress stellar light, while preserving as much planet light as possible for observation. This list includes beam-shaping optics (the PIAA part), conventional apodizers (sometimes in addition to the PIAA part), a destructive interference inducing focal plane mask, and Lyot stops to block additional starlight diffracted toward the edge of the post-focal plane mask pupil plane. Feel free to learn more about PIAACMC and its current state ad nauseam from my dissertation after I graduate!

While I currently professionally live and breath PIAACMC, it’s not all I do – especially in the midst of our current living situation where we’re all stuck at home, or would rather be (thanks essential workers). To keep the boredom at bay, I’ve taken to revisiting some old hobbies, as well as to acquiring some new. Let me explain.

Back as an undergraduate, I pursued a degree in math. I studied group theory, real and complex analysis, topics in linear algebra, and number theory to name a few. In addition to learning about these fields, I would often spend time learning about the historical figures who helped prop them up. In particular, I really enjoyed learning about the many mathematicians and other scientists who contributed to number theory. Why? Because historically number theory has few practical applications, so everyone was said to be doing math for math’s sake when they studied the field. What a pure intellectual pursuit (according to 20 year old me anyway)!

As you may currently be thinking, I’ve recently been looking up mathematicians and their contributions to number theory. Some of my discoveries have been the creator of TeX, Dr. Donald Knuth’s, early “journal” contribution discussing an alternative standard system of weights and measures: Potrzebie (did you know the speed of light is roughly 9.8e15 Potrzebies/Clarke, or 9.8e15 thicknesses of MAD magazine #26/the average rotation time of the earth in seconds?). A few other nuggets I’ve found include the largest numbers used in a mathematical proof (Skewes numbers), and the calculation of Brun’s constant revealing a flaw in an Intel Pentium chip architecture. Fun stuff!

For the new, I recently learned a method to solve a 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube. Using the so-called Beginner’s method, I have an average of five solve time of about one minute and thirty-five seconds. This is abysmally slow for speed-cubers, but that’s not the point. It’s just a precursor to study the Rubik’s Cube group, and to have bragging rights that I can actually solve a cube.

Hopefully everyone is finding interesting ways to entertain themselves.

And since I’ve been talking about numbers, how about a Song of the Day with at least one: One by Metallica.

Before I moved to Tucson, I thought there were four seasons. Since living here, I’ve learned there are five. Fall, winter, spring, summer, and the North American Monsoon.

I also used to think summer started at the end of May. However, we’re already facing our first 90+ºF (32+ºC) day next week.

Soon we will become nocturnal desert dwellers, emerging at night or before dawn for our socially distant jogging. Eventually, it will be too hot even for this, and we will have to estivate.

Also, the University just announced its furlough plan on Friday, which will impact many of our People. This may have far reaching impacts, possibly extending even to our blog operations.

The Blog Board of Regents will have to weigh in.

Because of all this, your Song of the Day is “Summertime Sadness” by Lana del Rey.

Of course, the definitive version is the dance remix by Cedric Gervais: